You should assume any disturbance of your brains chemical equilibrium is bad long term. Those drugs included. Absent fixing a specific deficiency that is.

If a study comes back and says, with a high confidence, that isn't the case for this or that, great, but I think it's a safe assumption for most chemicals.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm saying it's not enough to show something is bad, as pretty much everything is bad. It has to be bad enough to matter.

If you take the point a step further, your argument can be applied to everything including sugar, salt, etc.

I think we are mostly in agreement - that any substance entering the body will have some effect.

The question is what effect, how much of an effect, and wether it is permanent/long lasting. Questions which require a study to answer.

Totally agree. However, I highly doubt such a study will be possible for the same reasons we still argue about salt and sugar: what's the control?

Unless we're able to find twins that live largely the same lives absent the one factor, we are really only capable of sussing out the especially harmful things with long term lifestyle studies. If cannabis is as bad as sugar, then we have 40 years of back and forth to look forward to, and the answer will ultimately be: A little bit is bad, but not bad enough to matter more than how many steps you took today, or how sad or angry you were, or how late you ate dinner.

I don’t think assumption is the correct stance, but a healthy skepticism sounds in order.

Alcohol is clearly capable of long term impairment, the debate seems to be about dose response. Nicotine is more questionable, but clearly leaves long term changes in the mind. People abstaining after long term nicotine usage will spend the rest of their lives experiencing cravings. Hell, it seems plausible long term consumption of food types has long term cognitive effects.